Michael Reed
is a Linux professional and freelance writer now. But once upon a time, he was a Linux beginner, too.
HOW WE TESTED…
For this Roundup, we considered things from the perspective of a Linux beginner. One of the first decisions we made was the choice of edition. In each case, we concentrated on the main edition of that distribution rather than confusing matters by delving into different flavours and derivatives.
On this occasion, we didn’t carry out any benchmarking, but we kept an eye out to make sure that everything we did was performant. In our opinion, an ‘old’ desktop or laptop PC tends to be powerful enough to carry out all the basic computer tasks using a typical Linux distribution these days. If you’re looking at equipping a really old machine with less than 4GB of RAM, lightweight distros are a separate category and one that we’ve covered in the past.
Hardware support is another area that we have to examine, but in each of these five cases, it looked like all typical eventualities would be covered, including installation of proprietary drivers.
HOW WE TESTED…
For this Roundup, we considered things from the perspective of a Linux beginner. One of the first decisions we made was the choice of edition. In each case, we concentrated on the main edition of that distribution rather than confusing matters by delving into different flavours and derivatives.
On this occasion, we didn’t carry out any benchmarking, but we kept an eye out to make sure that everything we did was performant. In our opinion, an ‘old’ desktop or laptop PC tends to be powerful enough to carry out all the basic computer tasks using a typical Linux distribution these days. If you’re looking at equipping a really old machine with less than 4GB of RAM, lightweight distros are a separate category and one that we’ve covered in the past.